Generally, people use shopping carts when shopping in large shopping centers, such as Wallmart or grocery corners of departments in order to load and carry lots of things during shopping. Such a shopping cart comprises a container part 1 in the form of an iron net container for containing various things, casters 2 provided at the lower end of the container part 1 for allowing the container part 1 to move, and a handle 4, which facilitates direction change and movement of the cart.
Since the carts are convenient tools for shopping, the shopping carts are being used in almost large-scale shopping centers by a lot of people every day. Accordingly, the carts used by a lot of people easily get dirt due to dust and grocer dregs. Moreover, various kinds of bacteria and germs are likely to stick to handles of the carts through hands of people and thus the carts may become sources of germs.
In the past, there were no effective shopping cart washing machines. Although there has been a sterilizing apparatus for sterilizing shopping carts using steam, the apparatus is not useful because some portion of the cart, such as a handle which is made of synthetic resin is deformed during a sterilizing process due to weak heat resistance of the synthetic resin. There has been another washing machine which washes the cart by spraying washing water. However, this washing machine cannot be automatically controlled, and thus operators are needed to manually control the washing machine. Further, this washing machine has another problem in that the cart is likely to be turned upside down in the machine due to pressure of the sprayed washing water. Accordingly, with this washing machine, washing efficiency was low. Moreover, since a container part of a cart, which is a loading part, is formed in an iron net form, it was difficult to completely remove the dirt sticking to the container part only by the means of brushing. In particular, a handle part of the cart, which is the part that may be severely contaminated, is hardly washed.